The Day After Roswell

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUN 30, 1997

Never mind a crashed saucer with dead aliens strewn around it. Corso has bigger news to impart: that alien technology harvested from the infamous saucer crash in Roswell, N.Mex., in July 1947 led directly to the development of the integrated circuit chip, and laser and fiber optic technologies, among other marvels--and that he knows this because he was in charge of distributing the harvest. Senator Strom Thurmond offers a foreword that will reassure readers that Corso is in fact a real person, and a patriot. Curiously, Corso first learned of the Roswell incident when, on July 6, 1947, he saw one of the alien bodies, which was en route to Air Materiel Command in Ohio. Fourteen years later, as the newly appointed head of the Foreign Technology Desk in Army R&D at the Pentagon, he "inherited" a file cabinet filled with Roswell debris. He details the "program" by which the debris and/or its technologies were released to defense contractors (and ascribes the invention of the transistor to discussions among Wernher von Braun, Bell Lab technicians and others regarding "silicon wafers from the Roswell crash"); he also explores the government's cover-up of the UFO phenomenon. Despite flashes of paranoia (e.g., of a KGB-manipulated "secret government within the government"), in general Corso comes off as calm, sober and rational. His claims are so outlandish, though, that the many readers he's going to attract likely will have difficulty discerning whether they are reading a hoax, ravings or the biggest story of the century.